communication

What Romain Virgo and The Mitchell can teach you about marketing.

There are a couple of jamaican artist I find interesting online. Romain Virgo and Tami and Wayne Mitchell.

I got introduce to them through my wife. She is a fan of their content on YouTube. The interesting thing about it is that she binge watch videos and the new ones that comes out.

The Mitchell’s vlog is Tami Chin and her husband Wayne Marshall talking about interesting stuff about their day. They include all aspect of their lives. Their children and so on.

After watching a few videos I became hooked at how they were able to rapidly grow their audience on YouTube to the point they have now become sought after host for various events.

Romain Virgo is the same. He build his YouTube audience taking us behind the scenes about his life as a musician and his daily interactions with his wife. It may seem boring on the surface but watching it will get you hooked.

Here are a couple marketing lessons I learnt from both of them.

Document what you do.

None of the content they post is planned. All they do is document there day and then edit and share. Nothing over complicated. All we are getting is access to their lives.

What we can learn from this is don’t over complicate your content strategy. Make it as simple as possible to go from idea to publish content. Make it apart of your daily routine to document something you want to share.

Later you can edit it down before publishing it online. And you can select what aspect to share.

Documenting also saves you time. Because it only takes a few minutes to record a video or write something down.

Share your struggles

For my wife she is attracted to what the children do. In adidition to that how the wives handle certain challenges which is also one other reason why she watches so often.

Wayne Marshall got me hooked with his various stories. He talked about how one of his friends put Marijuana in his bag and how he got caught with it in the US and how it affected his life.

There was another story about how he ended up in a difficult encounter with the law. These are true stories.

Romain shares about his early encounter in the music business. What life is like on tour.

My wife loves his wife and how she handles herself and the children. All they do is give us access to their lives.

What they share also helps others feel they are not alone in there struggles. Which builds the connection with the audience.

Engage your audience.

Tami and Wayne receive letters, gifts from people who watch their content. They also ask persons to help them support a worthy cause.

They also talk about current events. There was one video they were watching the elections in the US. I think they did a similar one for the local elections as well.

There was various videos about the lockdown and how they are dealing with school.

I remember once Wayne was working on a project and went to the hardware store to buy tools.

Embrace partnership to grow your reach.

Both Romain and the Mitchell’s embrace this concept. They are influencers in there own right but they also have an asset they can leverage.

Private sector companies reached out to them for various things.

In Christmas the Mitchell’s did a giveaway and one of the partners was grace Kennedy. They had others but that one I remember distinctly. And was able to reach there goal.

Romain did a entire video about a video shoot that involved his children. All of that came from documenting his journey.

The ad will be placed in various media outlets and lots more people will be exposed to his brand.

Conclusion

Don’t overcomplicate things when using online platforms to market yourself. Document what you do, edit and share.

Control the distribution

There is a popular saying that content is king. But I know alot of great content creators who are still trying to get the word out about their work.

They are even some that are highly dependent on others to do the distribution for them. This puts a restriction on what gets out and how often things can go out.

An example of this was in 2020 Tye Tribbett wanted to release a song. His label has reservations. He went on a rant on the internet about the issue.

I don’t know all the details except what I saw but my concern was this was a known headlining gospel artist that had little control of how his music is put out.

Compare that with Lacrae who has his own label. Even though he was signed to a major label for awhile he controls his distribution of his music.

Another example is Jamaican artist. They create lots of music but have little to no access to an audience. They have fans but they don’t control the method to reach them.

Think about it, you write and record a song. Shoot a video or whatever and then try to get other people to send it out for you. Part of that is what is known as influencer marketing.

Some try to get interviews on various platforms. Others get someone else to get the word out entirely.

What if there is a way that you can reach your audience directly. People who know you and want to here from you? Well you can. Build an audience for yourself and talk to them directly.

Seth Godin wrote about a concept called permission marketing. Which is simply get permission to contact someone who is interested in what you are doing.

The simplest way is email. The other is social media following. But the goal is to create a method to reach your fans directly that you control.

Though you may use other methods. Make sure you build an asset that you control.

Tyler perry built his empire organically collecting emails from persons who visited his plays.

Work at building that audience and overtime you will be in a position to expand your reach.

How trust get destroyed

What would you do if someone who suppose to have your best interest at heart don’t take you seriously? Here’s a true story.

A lady went to report an accident at a police station one day. The process seemed straight forward enough that it shouldn’t have taken much time.

While explaining what happened one of the police officers started to make fun of her and questioned what happened and why she had visited that particular station to make her report.

On top of that the way they treated her made her felt like she made a mistake visiting the police station. With tears in her eyes she left the police station crushed instead of feeling relieved having done the right thing.

No matter how small the situation is its important to treat everyone with respect. Trust can be very hard to earn and can be lost very quickly.

Importance of communicating changes to your customers

There was a guy who went to collect a package on behalf of a relative. Normally you only need a letter signed by the person to do this but some how the business added an extra requirement.

The new requirement is that the letter must be stamped by a notary public. The guy got that done returned and was denied because management added a new requirement.

Changing requirements without informing the public is a very common problem. It leaves customers frustrated and can result in them taking their money elsewhere.

These type of situations also leaves a bad taste and reveals deception. There’s a better way to do this though.

When making changes that will affect how people do business with you inform them of the change way ahead of time.

That way it will remove the frustration of finding out the day you changed it.

It will also give people time to adjust to the new normal and lessen the expense and the back and forth.

Make sure the people see the message of the change. This could be done via email, social media update, running ads, sending out a press release to the media and so on.

Putting up signs and posters about the change in your business is also another way of informing your customers about new changes that will affect them.

The messaging don’t have to be complicated just simple and clear about what to expect and why was it necessary. Saying it way ahead of time will prevent angry confrontations or worse loss of business.